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Type of bind: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 720
EAN num: 9780767917445
ISBN number: 0767917448
Label: Broadway
Manufacturer: Broadway
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 576
Printing Date: October 10, 2006
Publishing house: Broadway
Release Date: October 10, 2006
Sale Popularity Level: 45073
Studio: Broadway
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For seventy-five years, it’s been Manhattan’s richest apartment building, and one of the most lusted-after addresses in the world. One apartment had 37 rooms, 14 bathrooms, 43 closets, 11 working fireplaces, a private elevator, and his-and-hers saunas; another at one time had a live-in service staff of 16. To this day, it is steeped in the purest luxury, the kind most of us could only imagine, until now.
The last great building to go up along New York’s Gold Coast, construction on 740 Park finished in 1930. Since then, 740 has been home to an ever-evolving cadre of our wealthiest and most powerful families, some of America’s (and the world’s) oldest money—the kind attached to names like Vanderbilt, Rockefeller, Bouvier, Chrysler, Niarchos, Houghton, and Harkness—and some whose names evoke the excesses of today’s monied elite: Kravis, Koch, Bronfman, Perelman, Steinberg, and Schwarzman. All along, the building has housed titans of industry, political power brokers, international royalty, fabulous scam-artists, and even the lowest scoundrels.
The book begins with the tumultuous story of the building’s construction. Conceived in the bubbling financial, artistic, and social cauldron of 1920’s Manhattan, 740 Park rose to its dizzying heights as the stock market plunged in 1929—the building was in dire financial straits before the very first apartments were sold. The builders include the architectural genius Rosario Candela, the scheming businessman James T. Lee (Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis’s grandfather), and a raft of financiers, many of whom were little more than white-collar crooks and grand-scale hustlers.
Once finished, 740 became a magnet for the richest, oldest families in the country: the Brewsters, descendents of the leader of the Plymouth Colony; the socially-registered Bordens, Hoppins, Scovilles, Thornes, and Schermerhorns; and top executives of the Chase Bank, American Express, and U.S. Rubber. Outside the walls of 740 Park, these were the people shaping America culturally and economically. Within those walls, they were indulging in all of the Seven Deadly Sins.
As the social climate evolved throughout the last century, so did 740 Park: after World War II, the building’s rulers eased their more restrictive policies and began allowing Jews (though not to this day African Americans) to reside within their hallowed walls. Nowadays, it is full to bursting with new money, people whose fortunes, though freshly-made, are large enough to buy their way in.
At its core this book is a social history of the American rich, and how the locus of power and influence has shifted haltingly from old bloodlines to new money. But it’s also much more than that: filled with meaty, startling, often tragic stories of the people who lived behind 740’s walls, the book gives us an unprecedented acess to worlds of wealth, privilege, and extraordinary folly that are usually hidden behind a scrim of money and influence. This is, truly, how the other half—or at least the other one hundredth of one percent—lives.
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Rated by buyers 
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If you've ever wondered what it would be like to live in the most beautiful apartment building in NYC, read this book, it's fascinating. *****
Rated by buyers -
It's a great book to read if you are interested in the History of New York that most people don't know about. I could not put it down and after reading it I actually went to the building to see what it looked like.
Rated by buyers 
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I'm on pg 184, and vow to get to the end, but I don't expect it to be easy. Like the other comments, I agree that pictures would have been wonderful to include, just so I could endeavor to keep some of these people straight. This book gets so weighed down with names, and they've become a blur. Junior Rockefeller was interesting, but all the names of each and every lawyer and law firm and decorators and whatnot it just bogs it all down.
I'm doing Google searches on the main people, just so I can try to paint a better mental picture.
**edited - I didn't make it through the book. It's not worth my time.
Rated by buyers 
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Michael Gross has been living in New York City his entire life. That's a nice way of saying that he comes by his real estate obsesssion naturally. All New Yorkers seem to talk about these days is where they live, where they want to live and how much it costs.
That makes 740 Park is a natural subject for Gross who's got a sharp wit and fine sense of what makes his native city's power brokers tick. 740 Park is a great read for anyone wanting a history of one of the city's big name building, one of those places that almost everyone in towns wants to own but only a few - very few - even get to visit.
I liked this book both for its dish and its perpective and that's a hard act to pull off successfully. Gross does a fine job.
Rated by buyers -
I lived in NY from 1989-1994, worked around the corner at Ralph Lauren and have always had a strong interest in architecture and New York history. I bought this book with enthusiasm.
I couldn't believe how much information is packed into it. There are over 500 pages! About page 20, I began to get lost. I simply couldn't read it. It is packed with so much minutae and tedious history of each and every tenant that it became absurd.
Here is what (my version) of his writing is. Imagine 500 pages of:
"Lucretia Davis was the widow of Malcom Dodge Davis, the same Dodges who came over on the Mayflower and began to buy up land outside of Dodgeville, MS. The old Mississippi Dodges met the Fish family when wintering in Jekyll Island and they began a friendship that cultimated in Betsy Fish's marriage to Dennis Davis and the birth of their daughter Emily Davis in 1911. In that year, the entire Davis clan, and the Fish family formed a corporation, known as Dodge Fish which eventually became the F. Dodge Fish Financial Bank. This bank began serving customers on July 21, 1921 but not before a terrible fire at 5 Wall Street which began on the night of July 20, 1921 and severely burned Mrs. Fish Davis so that she was forced to recuperate in Oyster Bay, NY where she met her subsequent husband Dr. Leonard Foxhound Koop."
This book should not be read in bed or on a full stomach.
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